Former Charlotte Amalie High School principal Alcede Edwards has asked the court to order a “more definite statement” from a student who filed suit against him and others over sex abuse by former CAHS track coach Alfredo Bruce Smith, saying the complaint is a “quintessential ‘shotgun’ pleading” and that he needs more information to mount “a fact-specific qualified immunity defense.”
Edwards’ motion was filed Wednesday in V.I. District Court, the deadline U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Alan Teague set for his response to the suit that was filed Dec. 23 by the student who is identified in the complaint as John Doe to protect his privacy as the victim of a sex crime.
Smith — who is also a defendant in the lawsuit — was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison last April after pleading guilty to 20 charges that included: aggravated second-degree rape; first-degree unlawful sexual contact; coercion and enticement; and production of child pornography.
The longtime CAHS hall monitor and coach was arrested in September 2021, accused of sexually abusing a dozen student athletes over a period of 15 years.
Lead prosecutor Everard Potter said at Smith’s sentencing that he was “troubled that for 15 years this kind of conduct could be going on at this school … These offenses occurred on campus, in respective school hours, in classrooms, on the beaches, using the Charlotte Amalie High School van to perpetrate offenses.”
An investigation by the Department of Homeland Security provided details of the 12 instances of rape, sexual assault, coercion of minors, and production of child pornography committed by Smith. Prosecutors also mentioned the three occasions where he was confronted about his behavior but continued to accost and assault children placed in his care.
The Doe suit also names the Virgin Islands government, the Education Department, Board of Education, Human Services, teacher Camelia Febres, and “Richard Roes 1-20,” who are “as-yet unidentified school officials, board members, teachers, coaches, social workers, administrators, or other employees or agents of the GVI, VIDE, BOE, and/or VIDHS” who knew or should have known about Smith’s years of abuses or who otherwise failed to safeguard students.
Collectively, all of the defendants are accused of depriving Doe of his bodily integrity, violating the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause; failure to train staff; state-created danger; three counts of conspiracy; violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act; civil conspiracy; civil assault; civil battery, and negligence.
The V.I. government, Board of Education and Education and Human Services departments are accused of quid pro quo harassment, creating a hostile environment, deliberate indifference, failure to train, and retaliation.
The 46-page complaint describes Edwards as “a school official with a duty to report alleged abuse” and someone with actual knowledge of Smith’s crimes, and Febres as “someone who knew Plaintiff feared being forced into a room” with Smith during a March 2019 school trip to Puerto Rico. Edwards was placed on administrative leave late last year amid an internal investigation into the handling of the allegations against Smith and officially retired effective Dec. 16, according to the Education Department.
The other defendants have yet to respond to the suit, and only Edwards was given a deadline of March 19 to reply, according to the publicly available documents on the court docket.
Edwards, represented by St. Thomas attorney Robert A. Leycock, instead filed a motion requesting that Doe amend his verified complaint. A memorandum of law in support of that request begins with a quote by President Abraham Lincoln, stating, “In law it is good policy never to plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you cannot.”
According to the filing, Doe’s complaint “is replete with conclusory, vague, and immaterial facts not logically connected to any particular cause of action, and it asserts a multiplicity of federal and territorial claims without specifying which of the defendants are responsible for which acts or omissions allegedly giving rise to each claim.”
The complaint is also worsened by the fact that each of the multiple counts adopts the allegations of all preceding counts and furthermore, “it makes wildly speculative allegations, couched as facts, that border on the fanciful, which are not entitled to the assumption of truth,” according to Edwards’ memorandum.
Such statements do not comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure P. 8(a) (2) that require a plaintiff “plead plausible facts — not wildly speculative legal conclusions — that give Mr. Edwards adequate notice of the claims asserted against him so that he can reasonably prepare a response” without having to guess what constitutes a cause of action, it says.
Additionally, the Doe complaint doesn’t specify whether Edwards is being sued in his official or individual capacity, which the memorandum calls a “critical shortcoming,” noting that whether he is entitled to the defense of qualified immunity — a type of legal immunity that protects government officials from lawsuits alleging they violated a plaintiff’s rights — “turns on the capacity in which he is being sued.”
The memorandum seeks clarification of that issue as well as specifics and “plausible facts” showing how:
— Edwards knew, or should have known, that Smith was engaged in a criminal venture that involved the trafficking of minors in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act;
— How he received financial or other benefit from Smith’s sexual exploitation of children “within the meaning of the TVPA”;
— How he had “actual knowledge” of Smith’s abuse of the male students at CAHS, as alleged throughout the complaint;
— And “what, if any, affirmative act” he took that caused Doe to suffer harm under the state-created danger exception.
Under that exception, “there must be a direct causal relationship between the affirmative act of the state and plaintiff’s harm,” the memorandum states. Critically for this case, it says, “the Third Circuit has ‘repeatedly held that an alleged failure to do something, standing alone, cannot be the basis for a state-created danger claim,’” citing Johnson v. City of Philadelphia.
“Whatever its other deficiencies — and there are several amenable to a motion to dismiss — the Verified Complaint is glaringly deficient in failing to provide Mr. Edwards with sufficient facts and specificity to reasonably mount a fact-specific qualified immunity defense,” the memorandum states.
Teague had not ruled on the motion as of Thursday afternoon.
